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The current workforce knows no boundaries. Organizations are no longer filled with full-time employees – they have a much larger ecosystem made up of a variety of contractors and partners.
Ultimately, this means more devices, from more locations, can access corporate resources than ever before.
“In this borderless world, you not only need to secure access to these resources from outside your own network and organizational boundary, but you also need to be able to control access to them,” said Sagnik Nandy, President and CDO for Human Resources. identity at Okta.
And traditionally, companies have often invested in disjointed tools—then quickly and sadly found they were unable to keep up with modern day business.
“It requires too many custom integrations and transfers, and also results in a poor user experience, which in turn hinders user adoption,” Nandy says. “Silos and low adoption rates limit visibility and the vulnerabilities remain.”
This is the dilemma Okta wants to solve with Okta Workforce Identity Cloud. The company unveiled the unified identity tool at its annual Octane22 conference this week.
Avoid Identity Silos
The Workforce Identity Cloud provides a single plane of control that gives IT and security teams the ability to manage identity across all enterprise resources and users, “which is becoming increasingly challenging in a borderless world,” Nandy says.
The tool unites the “three pillars of modern identity management” in one control panel: IAM, Identity Governance and Administration (IGA) and Privileged Access Management (PAM).
It includes Okta Identity Governance, which simplifies the process of requesting and granting access to resources, enabling IT teams to ensure that only the right users have access to the specific resources. It also includes Okta Privileged Access, which secures highly privileged credentials for administrator and root accounts. And it gives administrators the necessary tools to strengthen the security of privileged resources, monitor and record privileged access, and run detailed compliance reports for auditors, Nandy said.
The tool provides an orchestration layer that leverages automation and provides visibility and control over corporate identities, Nandy said, and can pull in signals from third parties.
All things considered, Workforce Identity Cloud integrates across the entire security stack and helps IT teams manage access for all use cases, Nandy said. This can help eliminate trade-offs between user experience and security, and allow IT and staff to become “more agile and productive.”
Nandy highlighted the fact that Okta is independent and neutral, making it compatible with thousands of applications, users, devices, operating systems and infrastructure providers. And the company continues to look for new use cases for business challenges around identity, he said.
“Given the rise of multi-cloud and the continued adoption of a broad and deep ecosystem of SaaS applications, identity solutions for privileged and non-privileged users really need to span the entire landscape of technology choice, or risk creating the kind of identity silos that lead to security holes,” says Nandy.
The right access at the right level at the right time
Identity Access Management (IAM) is a framework for ensuring that the right users have the access they should (or not) have to an organization’s technology resources. And, with the average cost of a data leak At a record high of $4.35 million, demand for (IAM) tools like Okta’s continues to grow. Fortune Business Insights puts the market on track to reach $34.52 billion by 2028, up from $13.41 billion in 2021 (a CAGR of 14.5%).
Okta – which competes for market share with the likes of Oracle, IBM, SailPoint and Azure – aims to take IAM to a new level and also converge access management, identity management and privileged access.
Okta Workforce Identity Cloud addresses a wide variety of identity needs, but Nandy highlighted the many inherent risks of perpetual privileges. That is, when privileged accounts or users have permanent access to critical infrastructure and resources.
Ultimately, these create more security vulnerabilities as they extend access to users who may no longer need it, targeting their user credentials to threat actor assets.
“We’ve seen a lot of attacks that originate from this kind of standing privilege,” Nandy says.
By integrating IGA and PAM with IAM, IT has greater power and control over access management without compromising security or user experience, he said.
Today’s technology environment is heterogeneous, so it’s critical to integrate well with everything, Nandy said. However, most providers view IGA, PAM, and IAM as distinct, rather than a unified approach. This limits which devices and operating systems they can manage as part of a single platform, rather than a platform that spans multiple operating systems, applications, devices, and user types.
But, he said, organizations need to recognize that they have the opportunity to improve the experience, keep customers safe and allow app builders to focus on what matters most: innovating for their customers. It just requires the right mix of tools.
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